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61st Congress 1 SENATE { ^""ST 

3d Session / I No. HM 



THOMAS BRACKETT REED 

ADDRESS 

BY 

HON. SAMUEL W. McCALL 

UPON THE UNVEILING OF 
THE MONUMENT OF 

HON. THOMAS BRACKETT REED 

AT PORTLAND, ME. 
AUGUST 31, 1910 




PRESENTED BY MR. LODGE 



March 3, 1911. — Ordered to be printed 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1911 



ET&C1- 






ADDRESS BY HON. SAMUEL W. M( CALL UPON 
THE UNVEILING OF THE MONUMENT OF 
HON. THOMAS BRACKETT REED, AT PORT- 
LAND, ME., AUGUST 31, 1910. 



A statue of a human figure, which does not represent a mere ab- 
straction but a real and once breathing man, draws much of its sig- 
nificance from the nature of the forces creating it and also from a 
fit association with the spot where it is reared. At a time when 
government is expected to do everything, it is becoming quite too 
much the fashion to build monuments by law and pay for them by 
money taken by taxation from the people. The tribute thus ren- 
dered involves no special sense of sacrifice on the part of any human 
being. It is indeed cold compared with that which is paid by vol- 
untary gifts and comes springing from the hearts of the givers. In 
one of the public squares of Washington stands a figure of Lincoln. 
It is not striking merely as a work of art, but it acquires a beauty 
and a pathos from the fact that it was reared by many small gifts 
from men and women whom his immortal proclamation had made 
free. It is surely a felicity that the statue of Thomas Brackett Reed 
which you unveil to-day should have been raised by the free gifts of 
those who knew and loved him and not from a levy upon any public 
treasury. Nothing could be happier also than its association with 
the spot where it is placed. It is ideally fitting that it should stand 
in the streets where he once played as a boy, in the city where he 
was born and lived nearly his whole life through, and where he now 
rests from his labors. I imagine you did not have in mind at all 
the last sentence of that beautiful speech of his spoken here a quarter 
of a century ago, but how perfectly this occasion seems to respond 
to it: 

Whatever fame great achievements may bestow, whatever honors the world 
may give, it is ever the most cherished hope of every seeker after fame or 
fortune to be kindly remembered and lovingly honored on the spot which gave 
him birth. 

It is no common thing for the citizens of a city like this, the com- 
mercial capital of a great State, to set up a statue in its streets, and 
we are now to render some answer to the question, What reason justi- 
fies this hour and what is its real meaning? The answer was sim- 
pler, although the occasion had no greater merit when you were put- 
ting up the statue of Longfellow ; and it was simpler because of the 
difference in the nature of their work between a poet and a states- 
man. The statesman lives in the field of practical controversy; the 
poet in the realm of ideals. It is not an uncommon fate of poets to 
be neglected in their lifetime and to have their birthdays celebrated in 
after generations. But the statesman is feted in his life and too 
commonly forgotten when he is dead. It is not difficult, I think, to 

3 



4 THOMAS BEACKETT REED. 

find the reason for this difference. The poet, if he be a real one as 
your- was, deals not with the shifting conditions of the time, but 
with what Sainte-Beuve called "the eternal humanity." Time takes 
little from the sweetness of his songs, and ages after he is gone they 
go as freshly and as warmly to the hearts of men as when they first 
dropped from his lips. 

And the genuine poet sings not merely to other ages, but to other 
countries than his own. and there is a simplicity and a universality 
to his fame. But the statesman lias to do with the complex machin- 
ery of the State, never more complex than now, and however ar- 
dently he may wish to realize his ideals and fly above the clouds, 
he may not get too far from the earth without coming suddenly 
too near it with the vast interests in his keeping, in the collapse of 
a general ruin. He deals, too. with the shifting sands of popular 
opinion instead of with the " eternal humanity " and the absorbing 
issues of to-day are thrust aside by the aggressive issues of to-mor- 
row and are forgotten. Much of his work is blended into the gen- 
eral aggregate of social achievement and does not stand visibly by 
itself. His fame is less universal since the barriers of patriotism 
often hedge it in. But yet he richly earns the gratitude of his time 
and of posterity, if he does his duty well, for the State is an indis- 
pensable instrument of civilization, making it possible for men to 
thrive, for cities to spring up, for poets to sing, and, indeed, for 
society to exist. And so you honor to-day one wdio deserved the 
name of statesman in the noblest meaning it can have with us. since 
it is men like him who keep the idea of representative government 
from dying out. He was not lacking in the practical touch de- 
manded by the nature of his work, and yet practical as his work was 
we shall see how finely and firmly he lived up to his ideals. 

In order the better to understand what manner of man he was. 
let us consider the character of the stock from which he sprung. 
For two centuries before he was born his ancestors in nearly every 
line dwelt along the seacoast now included in Maine. It was not one 
of the great settlements which George Cleve, himself an ancestor of 
Reed, planted on the shores of Casco Bay, but no other settlement in 
America can claim a more stirring and dramatic history. Cleve was 
as masterful a man as ever led out a colon} 7 to found a new empire. 
He was an independent in religion, but his little settlement was not 
entirely made up of those who believed in his own creed. The Royal- 
ist, free-living element among them occasionally became conspicuous 
and gave themselves some of the pleasures of life, although it is not 
easy to imagine a narrower range of gayety than that spread before 
them. After a little time Massachusetts asserted its title to this 
coast, and. with the aid of the whipping post and the ducking stool, 
planted ;< civilization here upon the most austere Puritan models. 
The Cleve settlement was upon a dangerous frontier, with the Indian 
and Frenchman to the north. More than once during its first century 
it was all hut obliterated in Indian wars. Portland was depopulated 
and remained a waste place for a generation. The original settlement 
was almost purely of the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon stock. Puritan 
chiefly, though with a touch of what was called the Cavalier, and 
it was augmented by additions from the Massachusetts Puritan 
and Pilgrim, and later by an infusion of the Scotch-Irish and the 
Huguenot bloods. 



THOMAS lUIACKF/LT HKED. 5 

But it remained decidedly Anglo-Saxon. Two centuries after it 

had been planted it is doubtful whether a population more purely of 
the English blood could have been found anywhere, either in the old 
country or in the new. It was thus of the greal imperial race of the 
world. From one motive or another, thai race has spread from it- 
little island nest into the empty lauds over all the habitable globe, 
carrying with it a genius for self-government and planting every- 
where free commonwealths. Its instinct for government is so per- 
sistent that even when it has emptied the jails of London and sent 
forth penal colonies it has after a time, like flowing water, worked 
itself pun' and exhibited again the spirit of orderly government. 
Sidney Smith was not simply employing the touch of the satirist 
when he predicted that the time might come when some Botany Bay 
Tacitus would record the crimes and splendors of an emperor lineally 
descended from a London pickpocket. 

The men who founded the State of Maine were the choices! speci- 
mens of the English race. They were willing to face the perils of 
the ocean, at that time terrible in reality and more terrible still to 
the imagination: to brave a rigorous climate: to strive to wring a 
living from an infertile soil and from the sea ; and to wage long 
wars against the red man in order that they might enjoy civil and 
religious liberty. While the original purity of the stock has been 
unimpaired, the psychologists of the Nation tell us that a new race 
practically has been evolved from this intense struggle and this new 
environment, with strong, new qualities grafted upon the old. 

Reed's first ancestor of his name in this country apparently came 
to Salem, Mass., about 1630, and the son of this ancestor found his 
way to Maine. Reed never concerned himself much about his remote 
pedigree. He accepted himself as he was, without a wish to invoke 
in his behalf the merit of ancestors, content to know the general 
character of his stock. He once proposed a toast to Maine, settled, 
as he said, " chiefly by the blood of old England, but always prefer- 
ring liberty to ancestiy." His ancestors, he once remarked, never 
held, any position of great emolument, judging by his own financial 
condition when he arrived. There can be no doubt, however, of 
the excellence of the individual lines blended in him, containing as 
they did the George Cleve and the Massachusetts Puritan and Pilgrim 
strains. Some of his ancestors were captured or killed in the Indian 
wars, and another was with Paul Jones when he captured the Serapis. 
His own father was a sea captain commanding sailing vessels in the 
coasting trade, a calling which required authority and courage. 

Reed was very fortunate in his education. In his later years he 
declared that he had long thought it the greatest good fortune of his 
life that he had spent five and one-half years under Master Lyford. 
a famous teacher of the Portland Boys' High School. After a 
thorough preparation he entered Bowdoin College at the age of 16. 
The modern college had not then come into existence, and Bowdoin 
offered a course containing much Latin, Greek, and mathematics, 
with few or no elective studies, and gave the rigid discipline of the 
best American colleges at that time. It was a discipline that has bred 
scholars and poets and statesmen, teaching them how to think and 
write and speak. At the head of the faculty was Leonard Woods, 
probably as cultivated and cosmopolitan a president as could be 
found in any college of that day. He had with him a small band 



6 THOMAS BRACKETT REED. 

of professors, nearly every one of whom was so distinguished as to 
be known even to this time outside the circles of his own college. 
After four years of study in close personal contact with such men he 
was graduated, almost the youngest man in a class numbering 55, of 
whom he was the leader in scholarship in the senior year and the 
fifth in average rank for the entire course. Aside from the regular 
work, he took the prize in writing, was an editor of the college paper, 
and was active in sports and in the social life of the college. We get 
a fascinating glimpse of him and of his care-free manner in a 
passage in one of his letters describing a long walk which he took 
upon a brilliant winter evening, when he would occasionally rest 
by throwing himself on his back upon high snowdrifts and gaze 
wonderingly upon the planet Jupiter. Enough is known of his 
college career to permit us to see his natural and easy growth and 
the spirit in which he strove to fashion himself in that bright morn- 
ing time — 

Ere the hot sun count 

His dewy rosary on the Eglantine. 

Those were four happy and fruitful years which he passed going 
in and out beneath the Brunswick elms, and there were few college 
men of that time who might not have envied him his opportunities 
for real culture and the manner in which he improved them. Like 
many another American boy, he was forced to rely somewhat upon 
his own efforts to meet his college expenses. There is an ideal touch 
in the circumstance, as if to prefigure his own career, that he was 
helped by another son of Bowdoin of kindred character who has won 
honorable place in the history of his country, William Pitt Fessenden. 
In the letter conveying payment of the full balance of the loan and 
interest young Reed gratefully wrote Fessenden : 

I have seen enough of the world to know that I might live as long again 
without finding a man who would do such an act of kindness in so kind a 
manner. 

In taking account of the special influences which helped to mold 
his mind and fit him for the work he was to do, we must not over- 
look his service in the Civil War and his residence in California. 

He was accustomed afterw T ards to speak lightly of his career of 
something more than a year as assistant paymaster in the Navy, as 
indeed he was wont to speak lightly of anything that might seem to 
increase his own personal importance. It was one of the precepts 
which he used to impress with a touch of drollery that " we make 
more jorogress by owning our faults than b} r always dwelling on our 
virtues." He might "well have pointed out that when the ship sinks 
the paymaster is as likely to go down as is the fighting sailor, but he 
said the Navy meant to him " not the roaring wind and the shrieking 
shot and shell, but smooth water and the most delightful time of my 
life." The Mississippi River, where he saw the most of his service, 
was at that time a scene of unsurpassed dramatic interest, and the 
time spent upon it, whether in fighting or not, broadened his experi- 
ence greatly, just as his residence in California in the formative days 
of that community widened the outlook of the future statesman. 

His career at the bar was admirable in its training for the public 
service. It was of the sort to develop whatever talent he had for 
the law. a talent that Avas certainly great. In his first five years of 



THOMAS BRACKETT REED. i 

practice he established himself so notably that he was made the 
attorney general of his State when but 30 years old, the youngest 
fige at which that office has ever been held in Maine. He was attorney 
general for three years during a time when the office dealt with a 
great variety of litigation, some of it as important as could engage 
the attention of a lawyer! He filled the place with great success. 
Then, for four years, he was counsel for the city of Portland. Thus, 
after a dozen busy years in which he maintained himself in the courts 
against lawyers of eminence, a period long enough to train him 
thoroughly as a lawyer and not so long as to put his faculties in 
perpetual slavery to that calling, and after a service in both houses 
of the Maine Legislature, he was elected to Congress at the age of 37. 

The term of Reed's first Congress began on the day when Gen. 
Hayes took the oath of office as President, an event which, if it did 
not inauguarte a new era, emphasized with a good deal of clearness 
an important transition in our history. It marked the end of State 
governments supported by nationaf bayonets and witnessed the 
restoration in form at least of civil government throughout the 
Union. At the first look, the 4th of March, 1877, appeared to usher 
in a time of political sterility succeeding an heroic age. We had 
witnessed so many signal events compressed within a brief period; 
we had fought among ourselves the greatest of wars; had freed 
4,000,000 slaves, and had at once made them, so far as paper could 
do it, equal self-governing members of our great democracy, and the 
doctrine of equal rights, both civil and political, had never before 
in the history of the world been practically applied on so stupendous 
a scale. 

After these achievements we had become politically blase and the 
ordinary routine of prosperous government was sure to pall upon 
the senses. We were attuned to the spectacle of having society; ab- 
stractly reconstituted every election day according to the most ideal 
models. The time that was coming in might seem humdrum, because 
• it was to succeed so impatient a regime when we strove to attain in 
a day an ultimate perfection and to experience all the sensations that 
come to a nation in a very long lifetime. 

But important questions were pressing themselves forward, not 
in a dramatic fashion, but with the quiet persistency with which 
natural laws compel attention, serious questions of governmental 
honesty, of finance, of the standard of value of our money, of taxa- 
tion — all vitallv involving not merely the prosperity but the honor 
and even the stability of the Nation. President Hayes courageously 
grappled with the new order. Although under the shadow of a 
clouded title, he won such success as to reestablish his party and, 
what is of far greater consequence, to deserve the gratitude of the 
oncoming generation. 

It was at the moment of this transition that Reed first took Ins 
seat in the House as a Republican. In the general principles of his 
party he firmly believed. Above all else he was possessed with the 
passion for human rights, which was the noblest heritage of the war. 
All issues relating to that as well as the supremacy of the Central 
Government within its sphere, the war had settled large for him. 
The House is a forum where, as he afterwards said, " distinction won 
in other fields of endeavor will ffain a man a hearing for the first 
time, but not afterwards." Although he had a brilliant career at 



8 THOMAS i;iIA( KETT REED. 

the bar ;in<l as a member of the Maine Legislature, he had established 
no reputation of the sort that would precede him to Washington. 
He went there with the ordinary passports of the new Member, and 
his career was entirely before him. With his ideal equipment for 
the work of the House, however, it was inevitable that he should 
speedily establish himself. 

The first real opportunity came in his appointment to the com- 
mittee to investigate charges of fraud in connection with the presi 
dential election. The manner in which he performed his part of t 
work attracted the attention of the country. Most of the Republicai 
leaders were disqualified from membership by the terms of the resolu 
tion. and, although a new Member, Reed was appointed. On the 
other hand, his political opponents were the seasoned veterans of 
their party. As he said of them, the household troops were ordered 
tip. In a short offhand speech upon the subject of the investigation, 
called out by an incautious attack by a member of the opposite party, 
he first gave the House a touch of his unique qualities as a debat' 
In that speech he displayed to such advantage his sarcastic hum. 
his power of repartee, and his force of argument, that he took rank 
at once as the most formidable debater upon his side of the House. 

To trace minutely his course during his service in the House would 
be to write a history of all the important legislation of that period. 
I shall refer only to those subjects that clearly overshadowed all 
others in the contests of that time. We now approach a field which 
has not yet passed exclusively into the domain of the historian. Some 
of the political questions of that day are still in issue and others have 
been so recently removed from politics that the fires yet smolder near 
the surface, compelling one to walk with caution. 

Upon the questions relating to the standard of our money, no clear 
line of division separated the parties. Members of each party were to 
be found upon both sides. Reed has expressed the opinion that a 
large majority of the American people favored inflation during the 
administration of President Hayes and that his courageous veto by 
arresting attention gave them a chance for reflection. Certainly their 
Representatives were ready to pass by large majorities bills for print- 
ing more greenbacks and for coining light-weight dollars. The wick- 
edness of the " bloated bondholder " seemed for the moment to engage 
the attention of that class of orators never absent in a democratic 
government who seek to win the suffrages of the people by inflaming 
them with a sense of fancied wrong. Reed's course from the outset 
was notably consistent. He stood resolutely for the maintenance of 
the gold standard. From the time when he opposed the coinage bill 
of 1878 until the final popular decree in 1896, he was the most potent 
force in the House of Representatives for maintaining gold as the 
standard of our money. The device embodied in the Sherman law, 
ho was persuaded, was necessary to forestall the passage of a free- 
coinage bill, but he strongly supported President Cleveland's effort to 
repeal that law, and under his leadership the far greater number of 
his party associates in the House voted for repeal. He gave the 
President unflinching support throughout the whole of the splendid 
fight which he made for maintaining the integrity of our money. 

As a constitutional result of the war, the black man was counted 
equally with the white in apportioning Representatives among the 



THOMAS BBACKETT REED. l) 

States, and the suppression of his vote gave to the war the practical 
ilt of greatly increasing the political power of the southern white 
nan in the National Government. Reed stood by the position of his 
party in favor of an election law to enable the vote of the colored man 
to he safely east and honestly counted in all national elections. The 
lime was still hot with the passions of the war and some of its fiercest 
parliamentary contests were waged over this question. 

The tariff struggle has been a perennial one since the adoption of 
the Constitution, and it was then particularly raging. Five general 
revisions of the tariff passed the House while Reed was a member of 
it — two Democratic and three Republican — although the essential 
difference between them justified very little of the heat displayed in 

te controversy. Reed believed in encouraging manufacture-, al- 
though the argument that seemed most strongly to weigh with him 
was of a social character and was based upon our higher standard of 
living, which required a higher wage than in the countries with which 
the competition was most keen. 

As a debater and parliamentary leader he must be accorded high 
rank. For nearly the entire period of his service the parties were so 
evenly balanced in the country that no party could be said to be in 
control of the Government. The House was usually Democratic the 
Senate Republican, while the Presidency alternated between the two 
parties. From 1877 to 1889 all the three parts of the legislative 
machine were not controlled by the same party at any single time, 
except for a period of two years. The Democratic Party, so long 
victorious before the war, was again reviving; and having control of 
the great popular branch of the Government, the House became the 
theater of the struggle, and it was there that the contest was most 
bitterly waged for the possession of the Government. I doubt if 
there has been another period of equal length in our history when the 
House was the scene of so much desperate party warfare, so much 
fighting of the short-sword order, and when there was a more impera- 
tive call for the qualities that fit men for intellectual combat. The 
Democratic Party was represented in that body by a group of ex- 
tremely able men, comprehending a wide diversity of talent. In the 
combination of resources which they presented it would be difficult to 
match them at any other time in the history of the House. It had 
parliamentary leaders and debaters like Carlisle, Randall, Crisp, and 
Turner, orators like Wilson, Cochran, and Bryan, and the list of its 
members possessing a really high order of talent might be much 
further prolonged. The necessity of the situation required the Re- 
publicans to keep their strongest man at the front. There are time- 
when the demands of the place are less exacting and some man of 
fairly respectable talent may be chosen by political intrigue in prefer- 
ence to a stronger man and may successfully go through the forms of 
leadership. But in this instance the best was none too good, and it is 
no disparagement of the Republican membership to say that when 
Reed became its leader he w T as so preeminently the man for the place 
as to stand in a class by himself; and from that time until he left the 
House 16 years later he remained at the head of his party, the longest 
period that any man has been the leader of a party in either the Sen- 
ate or the House. Men have been successful at the head of an opposi- 
tion who have failed in attempting to lead a victorious party. < Mhers 



10 THOMAS BRACKETT REED. 

have lacked in the fertility of resource necessary to attack who yet 
with a majority about them could stubbornly conduct a defensive 
battle. 

But Reed had the well-rounded qualities that made him equally 
successful both as minority and majority leader. He is. how- 
ever, more interesting as minority leader, because in the evolu- 
tion of our political institutions it became the custom to make the 
leader of the majority in the House the Speaker, and the limitations 
of that office were not so well adapted to his temperament as was the 
freedom of the floor. For 10 years he led the minority, sometimes, 
with a force at his back nearly equal to that of his antagonists and 
sometimes with a little band behind him outnumbered 3 to 1. It is 
the simple truth to say that great and varied as was the array of talent 
against him, he never was overmatched and he never appeared tc 
have all his reserves brought into action. 

Let us take some account of his equipment. His appearance was 
most impressive. Giant as he was in stature, he looked every inch 
a leader. His very look fixed the attention of the House. He was 
slow and distinct in enunciation, with a powerful and strident voice 
capable of cutting through the confusion and penetrating to the 
farthest recesses of the enormous hall. He alwa} 7 s used the lower 
tones of his voice, some of which were of great sweetness. He spoke 
without visible effort, rarely making a gesture, and a fine, strong 
light shone from his brilliant eyes, although in moments of great 
excitement they blazed with a consuming fire. 

His mind was a fit companion to his body. He had a remarkable 
power of statement, and when he was dealing with his opponent's 
case, instead of stating it first and then overthrowing it, he would 
often demolish it in the statement itself. " What the House likes 
best," he once said, " is plain statement, hard-hitting, and sense enough 
to know when one is done." He was able to seize unerringly upon 
the vital point in a controversy, and he would not concern himself 
over the little issues. He had the good taste to speak simply. He 
saw things clearly, could express his exact meaning in admirably 
chosen words, and his sentences were without a blemish from the 
standpoint of form. As to the commonplace shifts of the orator, 
the balanced periods and the worked-up passages, he never patronized 
them. 

But his preeminent quality was his humor, a quality until recent 
times very little used in public speaking, judging from the examples 
that have come down to us. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth 
century oratory with us seems to have been a desperately serious 
calling. One would no more look for a joke in one of the approved 
speeches of that time than in a demonstration of Euclid. And some 
real humor would certainly mitigate their reading very much. Even 
that prince of orators, Daniel Webster, would be more widely read if 
he had not so sternly restrained the sense of humor which he undoubt- 
edly possessed. Reed's humor often showed the finish and perfection 
of the finest wit. but there were no small barbed arrows in his quiver. 
It was rather, like the body of his argument, the play of heavy 
artillery, and it could as effectively sweep the field. 

His willingness to accept battle was superb. What was said of 
;•. famous debater in the British Parliament could truthfully be said 
of him: "He went out in all weathers:" but the weather that 



THOMAS BRACKET! 1 REED. 1] 

delighted him most was the storm; and no weather seemed so rough 
os to disturb his coolness and self-control. His speeches will usually 
be found in the Record just as he delivered them. He did not emu- 
late some of the great orators of former times, not to incut ion our own. 
and struggle with an occasion after it had passed by. He had not the 
habit of withholding his speeches for revision, to clothe them with a 
rhetoric which he would have spoken, but they were printed (he next 
morning as they had been delivered. 

He never wasted words. " Speech," he once said, " dies upon the 
empty air. Better a pound of fact than a shipload of language." 
During his service in the House it is doubtful if he made a half 
dozen speeches as long as a half hour, and the length of the greater 
number of them would not exceed five minutes. Those short speeches 
light up the Record and are models of their kind, making the situa- 
tion clear and bringing the House to a sense of what it was doing. 
On two occasions only did his speeches approach two hours in length. 
one being the closing argument for his side against the Mills tariff 
bill and the other the closing argument against the Wilson bill. 
Each occasion was the culmination of a long and bitter party con- 
troversy. The Mills bill embodied the central policy upon which 
Cleveland's campaign for reelection in 1888 was to be waged. The 
tariff was much discussed in those days, and in three successive presi- 
dential elections it was the overshadowing issue. It filled the mouths 
of our statesmen with large figures, and their contributions to the 
" dismal science " were usually in keeping with its name. An ancient 
tariff speech, of all speeches in the world, is not apt to be the most 
entertaining reading, but Reed's speech on the Mills bill is worth 
reading even to-day. There are indeed few congressional speeches 
of equal length that will bear reading so well. It has none of the 
wooden qualities of the spoken essay, no particle of the ornate fustian 
which so often made the pretentious speech of the last century such 
a thing of terror, but it is a fighting speech, glowing from beginning 
to end, full of irony, argument, wit, and eloquence, and was equally 
effective at the moment and when read later in the campaign it was 
chiefly meant to influence. 

The debate upon the Wilson bill took place at the climax of the 
tariff agitation. It was the dramatic moment of a political battle 
running through all of Cleveland's contests for the Presidency. 

In the first he was elected, in the next defeated, and at last again 
victorious, and for the first time supported by both Houses of his 
own political faith, he was at the head of a party responsible for 
the passage of a tariff bill, and one was about to be enacted which 
pleased nobody and which he himself refused to sign. The closing 
of the debate in the House presented a memorable spectacle, fitly 
marking the culmination of this long political struggle. The Capitol 
could scarcely contain the throng, and the great Chamber and its 
galleries were crowded to suffocation. Although the speech of Reed 
on that day began with the statement that " if anything seems to 
have been discussed until human nature can bear it no more, it is the 
tariff," both in its immediate effect and as it is read in the Record, it 
was worthy of a great occasion and measures up to the best standards 
of parliamentary eloquence. 

I believe that he has not been excelled as a debater by any man 
ever in the House of Representatives. There have been orators Avho 



12 rnoMAS bbac kett keed. 

have given more attention to rhetorical finish, but no man has sur- 
passed him in the history of the House, certainly for three-quart, 
of a century, in power of condensed statement, in a destructive 
ridicule, and in the stately and even flow of his speech, massive and 
strong. He appeared to the best advantage in his short speeches. 
That is not true of some of the other great parliamentary speakers. 
Take, then, either of his two longest efforts in the House, to which 
I have just been referring, that on the Wilson bill or that on the 
Mills bill. Read it by the side of any other debating speech you may 
select, either from the House of Commons or the House of Repre- 
sentatives, taking, however, a speech of the modern era, when short- 
hand reporting had been developed, that you may know you are 
leading a real speech and not an imaginary oration with the fine 
outbursts and beautiful periods, the careful result of after prepara- 
tion. I believe that Reed will stand the test so far as the reading 
is concerned. Then if you wish to imagine the immediate effect, 
remember that his delivery exactly fitted what he said, and that in 
action he looked the 20,000-ton battleship, with all its range of 
armament, its great and little guns in full play, and that with his 
variety and force of attack he seemed at the time invincible. 

Reed, as minority leader dealing with the rules, was always engag- 
ing the other side and putting its leaders to the necessity of using 
all their wits. No man ever had a better command of the procedure 
of the House. He played the parliamentary game hard, but played 
it according to the rules, and he never sought to embark the House 
upon revolution. 

While as minority leader he was opposed to legislative anarchy, 
as leader of the majority he stood equally against legislative im- 
potency. More conspicuously than with any other thing his name is 
identified with the overthrow of a system which enabled a minority, 
by refusing to vote, to produce a legislative paralysis and for negative 
purposes to control the action of the House. 

Speaker for six years, under the long-established practice of the 
House he was therefore its leader. He stated with exactness the 
character of the speakership when he was first chosen. In a speech, 
none the less admirable because in point of brevity it was at the 
time probably without parallel upon a like occasion, he said that 
under our system as developed the duties of his office were both 
political and parliamentary. 

So far as the duties are political, I sincerely hope that they may be per- 
formed with a proper sense of what is due to the people of this whole country. 
So far as they are parliamentary, 1 hope with equal sincerity that they may 
be performed with a proper sense of whal is due to both sides of this Chamber. 

Our speakership undeniably possesses this dual character and the 
question is often asked why it should have taken on the political 
aspect, when the speaker of the British House of Commons is in 
"licet a judicial officer. The chief reason may be found in the differ- 
ence between our parliamentary systems. In England there is an in- 
termingling of the executive and legislative functions. All the min- 
isters of the Crown are members of the one legislative chamber or the 
other. The leading minister in the House of Commons is the leader 
of that body. He and his colleagues in office direct its affairs and con- 
duct the Government under their responsibility to the Common.-. 



THOMAS BRACK KIT REED. 13 

When they fail to command a majority (hey go out of office. Bui we 
have no cabinet system. We do indeed have what is called a cabinet, 

but its members are purely executive subordinates of the President, a 
species of magnificent bead clerks, and are entirely lacking in par- 
liamentary functions. The Constitution contemplated separate de- 
partments, with Congress in a region by itself passing laws, and the 
President in his own secluded domain executing them, with an occa- 
sional formal message " on the state of the Union." Bui no great Gov- 
ernment can be effectively run with the two branches of its central 
political department only upon formal speaking terms, with the 
President sending coldly constitutional and polite notes to Congress 
and the latter in its own good time replying or not as it should see 
fit to do. To insure that harmony which is essential in the workings 
of all the parts of such a vast and complex governmental machine. 

here must be practical ways of reaching an intimate understanding. 

Through a process of evolution the speakership had come to be an 
important instrument in supplying the apparent gap left by the Con- 
stitution between the executive and legislative departments and to 
put them upon more workable terms. It presented the advantages of 
a centralized leadership representing in the first instance the popu- 
lar branch of the legislature and tended to secure a measure of the 
unity in government secured by the cabinet S} 7 stem. And as a balance 
to the President, such a commanding figure on Capitol Hill, always 
responsible to the House and subject to being overruled by it, has 
operated as a check upon the obvious tendency to autocracy incident 
to the growth of the Government and the centralization of power at 
Washington. 

The central and dramatic event in Reed's speakership was the 
counting of the quorum. The large number of the quorum required 
in the House, eightfold larger than that of the British House of Com- 
mons when the difference in the number of members is taken into 
account, makes it difficult for the party in control to maintain a 
quorum out of its own membership unless its majority is very large. 
It had for many years been the settled practice for the minority to 
attempt to defeat legislation to which they w r ere opposed by abstaining 
from voting when they could not accomplish the same result by di- 
rectly voting against it. Thus the majority had frequently been com- 
pelled to abandon legislation. The majority of the House might 
actually be present, but the method of determining its presence had 
been by the vote, and if a majority had not voted upon the roll call, 
business could not proceed. In Reed's first speakership his party had 
a very small majority. After a roll call upon a party question when, 
less than a quorum of Members had responded to their names, although 
many more were present, he directed the Clerk to note the presence of 
those who were present but had not voted. Thus a quorum was made 
up, and the vote was announced in favor of the proposition which 
had received a majority of those who had seen fit to vote. Hi- 
reasons were simple, and they were unanswerable from the constitu- 
tional standpoint. If Members could be present and refuse to exercise 
their function — 

the provision of the Constitution giving the House power to compel attendance 
of absent Members would seem to he entirely nugatory. Inasmuch as the Con- 
stitution only provided for their attendance, that attendance was enough. 



14 THOMAS BRACKETT REED. 

This ruling was followed by a parliamentary storm unprecedented 
in severity in the history of the House. For many hours it was not 
possible to proceed with the ordinary business on account of the up- 
roar. Members rushed down the aisles, filled the area in front of the 
Speaker, and denounced him with great violence of language as a 
tyrant and a czar. He held himself calm and unmoved amid the 
tumult, sustained by the consciousness that he was right, and that he 
was announcing a procedure which the Constitution contemplated 
and the growing demands of the country's business made absolutely 
necessary. 

The Supreme Court subsequently upheld the constitutionality of 
Reed's ruling, but his triumph was to be even more complete. His 
opponents were formally to sanction it. In a later Congress, when 
he led the minority and the party in control had returned to the 
ancient practice, he attacked it with every resource known to parlia- 
mentary law and succeeded in demonstrating its unsoundness. His 
antagonists, although they had a large majority, were unable to fur- 
nish a quorum from their own ranks. Reed's party, under his lead, 
refrained from voting, and thus for weeks the transaction of business 
was made impossible. And the men who had vehemently denounced 
him were compelled at last to adopt the principle of his ruling and 
affirm the practice that if a quorum is actually present the House can 
transact business whether Members vote or not. That has ever since 
been the law of the House. 

It required courage of the highest order to overturn the precedents 
of a century made by all parties, and previously assented to by him- 
self, and to establish a principle so correct and in accordance with 
common sense. But he was not disturbed upon the question of con- 
sistency. His dictum upon the subject proves that. 

I do not promise — 

He said — 

to give wisdom of adamant. I will give them honestly what my opinion is at 
the time; they must take the chances of its being for eternity. 

It has required a man of unusual quality to direct our great popular 
assembly in the days since the Civil War, when the business of the 
Government has growm so enormously, when the pressure from pri- 
vate interests has vastly increased, and w T hen partisanship has usually 
run so high. It is no light task to moderate that great turbulent body 
and to maintain orderly procedure. As Speaker, Reed fitly embodied 
the dignity of the House, and it never had a presiding officer who 
more inflexibly and fairly administered its rules. 

No greater Speaker ever presided over the House. Henry Clay, 
who directed not merely the affairs of the House, but to a large extent 
of the country during his speakership, was constantly taking the 
floor. He made a dozen or more speeches at a single session. I am 
not aware that during his whole speakership Reed took the floor 
either in the House or in Committee of the Whole. He held himself 
austerely in reserve. His rulings were models of just expression and 
possessed a weight and condensed power which it is difficult to match. 
He had the courage calmly to rise to great occasions, and with a hero- 
ism only equaled by his insight he established the greatest landmark 
in the parliamentary law of the House. 



THOMAS BRACKETT REED. 15 

Just at the end of his public career a new set of issues were coming 

forward. lie was opposed to the annexation of the Sandwich [slands, 
firmly believing that it was for the interest of the Republic to remain 
a continental power, and that it would contribute most effectively to 
the cause of good government throughout the world by furnishing the 
example of a well-governed democratic state and by scrupulous 
respect for the rights of weaker peoples. He was equally opposed to 
the Spanish War and used the power of his office, so far as he prop- 
erly could, to prevent both the annexation and the war. That power 
was great, but no man knew better than he that the Speaker was far 
from omnipotent; that he could only lead where the House was will- 
ing to follow, and his efforts were unavailing. 

The war was begun for the avowed purpose of putting an end to a 
condition in the Western Hemisphere which was within our tradi- 
tional sphere of action, but the important question it bequeathed to 
us was whether we should become an Asiatic power and take upon 
ourselves the government of populations almost under the Equator in 
the seas of the Orient. Reed's political education, the practice of his 
whole life, and his view of the fundamental principle of the American 
commonwealth made his position upon this question inevitable. 
Long before the Philippines appeared upon our horizon he declared 
in a speech in the House " that the best government of which a people 
is capable is a government which they establish for themselves. With 
all its imperfections, with all its shortcomings, it is always better 
adapted to them than any other government, even though invented by 
wiser men." The idea that America should violate its traditional 
principle of self-government and enter upon the work of governing 
subject States he hated with all the fierce hatred of a vanishing time. 
It seemed to him like abandoning the principle which made her 
unique among the nations. He was profoundly stirred by our taking 
on " the last colonial curse of Spain," but it had been done by a treatv 
solemnly ratified by the Senate, and he had come to the parting of the 
ways. His reelection to the speakership appeared certain, and that 
office, he once declared, had but one superior and no peer. His mind 
had been never so ripe. But he was heartsore at the prospect of fol- 
lowing the new and opposite line, and he determined to retire to pri- 
vate life. To his near friend, Asher Hinds, he said : " I have tried, 
perhaps, not always successfully, to make the acts of my public life 
accord with my conscience, and I can not now do this thing." 

And so he wrote his touching farewell letter to his constituents and 
withdrew from the public service. 

One would fail to do justice to Reed if he did not speak of his 
brilliancy and charm in conversation. His wise, bantering, and 
witty talk was the life of any social group in which he happened to 
be placed. There was no arrogance in his manner, he never took 
possession of any company, as social autocrats are apt to do, but none 
the less he was by common consent sure to take the lead. His sen- 
tentious witticisms became the talk of the town and were repeated 
from mouth to mouth. It is unfortunate that there was not some 
Boswell to take down his conversation and that so many of his bril- 
liant sayings have perished. His wit was ingrained in the substance 
of his style and was shown alike in conversation and in offhand 
speaking. He often united with it a homelv common-sense phi- 



16 THOMAS BRACKETT REED. 

losophy strongly resembling that of Dr. Franklin and a way of put- 
ting it that reminds one of Sidney Smith. In attempting to quote 
from him. it is equally difficult to know where to begin and where to 
stop, and after one is done he feels sure there are better specimens 
left. But I will venture a few short examples which may show 
something of the touch of his wit and philosophy. 

Bantering a House of the opposite party for doing nothing but 
talk, he said : 

it presents the dead level of a Dutch landscape with all its windmills but 
without a trace of its beauty and fertility. 

Of his own minority, he said : 

They behaved with gentleness and modesty, partly because they were very 
good men and partly because there were very few of them. 

And again of a Member who was a skillful lawyer, he said : 

There is no man in five kingdoms abler to dig a pit for a witness and sweetly 
coax him into it. 

Complimenting the honesty of an opponent to whom he was re- 
plying, he added : 

Such is tbe direct nature of his mind that tbere is no man so capable of 
thoroughly exposing the weakness of a bad position that he happens to occupy. 

This is his homely version of " omne ignotum pro magnifico," the 
principle in human nature which causes the gold-brick industry to 
flourish in politics and elsewhere : 

Everything we do not know anything about always looks big. The human 
creature is imaginative. If he sees a tail disappearing over a fence, he images 
the whole beast and usually images the wrong beast. * * * Whenever we 
take a trip into the realms of fancy, we see a good many things that never 
were. 

Speaking of a panic in Wall Street which squeezed the inflation 
out of values, he said : 

Water flowed down both sides of the street. 
Sometimes the world moves slowly. 

It took 4.000 years of pagan and t5 centuries of Christian civilization to 
produce a two-pronged fork and another century to bring it into use. 

We endure filth diseases thousands of years and call them visitations from 
God, and when some one proposes the remedy we listen in early ages with the 
horror suitable to greet a man who wishes to interfere with God's methods in 
the universe. 

Never expect toleration from a crowd that has other views and has them 
vividly. 

Wrong is never so weak as in its hour of triumph. 

The alternation of good times and hard times antedates the pyramids. 

If we ever learn to treat the living with the tenderness with which we in- 
stinctively treat the dead, we shall then have a civilization well worth dis- 
tributing. 

That is one of the laws of God working for his children, and. compared with 
one of your laws of Congress, it is as Leviathan to a clam. 

The description of the view from Cushings Island across Portland 
Harbor, in which he takes you from the Portland of to-day to the 
Portland of the time of Cleve's landing, will serve as an example of a 
different vein, showing his accuracy as an observer and his skill as a 
painter of a scene. 

The long slope of grassy verdure varied by the darker foliage of the trees 
spreads wide to the water's edge. Then begins the bright sparkle of the sum- 
mer sea. that many-twinkling smile of ocean, that countless laughter of the 
waves which lias lighted up the heart of man centuries since Eschylus died, and 



THOMAS BBACKBTT RKED. 17 

centuries before he lived. Across the sunlit waters, dotted with the white sails 
or seamed with the bubbling loam of the steamers' track, past the wharves, 
bristling with masts and noisy with commerce, the gaze talis upon the houses 
sloping quickly upward in the -enter and becoming more and more embowered 
in trees as they climb the hills at either end. Following the la II spires the eye 
loses itself in the bright blue sky beyond. * * * 1 1' you shu! your eyes and 
let the lofty spires disappear, the happy homes glisten out of sight, and Die 
wharves give place to a curving Hue of shelving, pebbly beach: it' you Imagine 
the bright water unvexed by traffic, the tall peninsula covered with forests and 
busby swamps, with the same varied expanse of island and of sea, and the 
whole scene undisturbed by any sound save the clanging cries of Innumerable 
birds and waterfowl, you will be looking upon Machigonne as it appeared to 
George Cleve. 

But beyond his brilliancy as a debater, his resplendent wit and his 
skill as a parliamentary leader, his title to remembrance rests upon 
his quality as a statesman. He had a great ambition, but it was not 
great enough to lead him to surrender any principle of government 
which he deemed vital. Like Webster, like Clay, and others of our 
most conspicuous statesmen, he was disappointed at not reaching the 
Presidency, but he could fitly aspire to the office, for he was of the 
fiber and nurture out of which great Presidents are made. He 
probably would not have been a continuously popular President, bul 
our great Presidents never have been. He had that supreme quality 
which was seen in Washington breasting the popular anti-British 
feeling and asserting against France our diplomatic independence: in 
Lincoln bearing the^burden of unsuccessful battles and holding back 
the sentiment for emancipation until the time was ripe for freedom; 
in Grant facing the popular clamor and vetoing inflation; and in 
Cleveland alienating his party while he persisted in as righteous and 
heroic a battle as was ever waged by a President. 

A great nation can not make up its mind in a moment. What first 
appeals to its fancy is not likely to appeal to its final judgment, and 
the severest test of the disinterestedness of the statesman under our 
system is his readiness to risk unpopularity and defeat in order to 
protect the people from their first impulse and give them an oppor- 
tunity to form a real opinion. Reed's faith was in what he called 
" the* deliberate judgment of the people," but he declared that " the 
sudden and unreflecting judgment of the noisy who are first heard is 
quite as often a voice from the underworld." This distinction is 
vital, since the cause of democracy has nothing to hope from the 
statesman who weakly yields to the temptation always to be popular 
and who panders to the noisy passions of the moment rather than 
consults the real interests of the people. Reed recognized no divini i y 
in an unthinking clamor, whether raised by one man or a great mass 
of men. The people could no more depend on inspiration to guide 
them in performing their public duties than in their private affairs. 
In each case reflection and work were equally necessary. He showed 
. his reverence for representative government by the calm dignity with 
which he bore himself during more than two decades of service. He 
was sometimes compelled to struggle to maintain himself, but he 
scorned to make the struggle upon demagogue lines, or to swerve 
from the straight path upon which he moved with so much majesty. 
He was not prigged up with the commonplace sort of greatness, with 
a padded and theatric make-up staged to strike the imaginations of 
little men or to set wagging the puffing pens of little writers. He 
S. Doc. 864, 61-3 2 



18 THOMAS BEACKETT REED. 

was no self-advertiser and ran no press bureaus to trumpet his real or 
imaginary virtues. He sought no mere noisy and ephemeral fame, 
but he lived upon a plane visible at history's perspective, and he 
grandly wove his life into the texture of his time. 

And so you rear this statue. And you do well to rear it. for, al- 
though his memory is one of the treasures of the whole country, it 
was you who gave him to the Nation. He was the product of the 
sky and soil of Maine, lightened by her sunshine and hardened by her 
storms. As a representative acts well or ill he reflects credit or dis- 
credit upon those who have chosen him. By this test how signally 
he honored you. But you equally honored yourselves when, amid all 
the shifting popular vagaries and the following of false gods, you 
permitted yourselves to be guided by the better genius of popular 
government and kept this heroic figure for so long a time in the serv- 
ice of his country. And when he returned his commission to you he 
could truthfully say, as he proudly said, " No sail has been trimmed 
for any breeze or any doubtful flag ever flown." That noble phrase 
gives the keynote to his character as a statesman. The only colors he 
was willing to fight under were those that represented his own prin- 
ciples. He never sailed just for the sake of sailing, but to make 
progress upon a straight course. He did not take his inspiration and 
direction from the winds, but from the stars. 

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